enfired like so many of my generation by president john f. kennedy and his call to service. i spent that summer right here in the senate as an intern for my home state senator, abe ribakov. he was and remains a personal hero of mine. and although i never would have admitted so publicly back then because it was so presumptuous, i came away from that experience with the dream that i might someday, somehow return to serve in this place. well, i have been blessed to live that dream, and that is what america is all about. we have always been a nation of dreamers whose destiny is determined only by the bounds of our own imagination and by our willingness to work hard to realize what we have imagined. indeed, long before the united states came into being as a government of institutions and laws, it was a dream, a dream, an an implausible and animated dream of a country not defined by its borders or its rulers or the ethnicity of its founders but by a set of eternal and universal principles that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are god's endowment to each of us. that was t